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Objectives: This study was designed to explore the effect of the New Rural Pension Scheme on depressive symptoms or medical costs induced by depression. Methods: We used the Logit, OLS and 2SLS models to explore the impact of the pension on depression and medical costs. We also adopt the method of quantile regression and discontinuity regression to verify the causal relationship between the New Rural Pension Scheme and depression or medical costs induced by depression of the rural elderly. Results: We have found that the New Rural Pension Scheme decreases depressive symptoms of elderly in rural China (OR = 0.90), and the medical costs induced by depressive symptoms by 4.6%. Regression discontinuity results showed that pension significantly reduced the depressive symptoms (depression) and the medical expenditure caused by depressive symptoms (depression) by using parametric and non-parametric methods, and performing a placebo test. The mediating effect results showed that pension may improve mental health by increasing confidence about the future. Conclusion: We demonstrate that the pension significantly decreased both mental health problems and the medical expenses due to depressive symptoms and depression of elderly in rural China. Therefore, our results suggest that the Chinese government should perfect the New Rural Pension Scheme to eliminate barriers to mental health resources, especially for the rural elderly.

As pension benefits from statutory public schemes become less generous, and many countries face pension-savings crises, the willingness to participate in supplementary retirement saving instruments becomes crucial for sustainable financial well-being. The main objective of this article is to present how trust and financial literacy influence the choice of sustainable auto-enrolment pension scheme as a private and supplementary pension savings. The study highlighted factors influencing participation in auto-enrollment and private supplementary pension savings. The study focuses mainly on financial literacy and trust. We used the CAWI method with 857 interviews in Poland—the first country in Central and Eastern Europe to introduce an auto-enrolment pension system. Our study uses multivariable data-mining tools, and several regression models were applied. We used Logistic Regression (LR), Multivariate Linear Regression (MLR), and Factor Analysis of Mixed Data (FAMD) to support the LR analysis. We propose four regression models. Our findings present that: 1. The lower the consumer’s knowledge level, the more their decisions are based on trust. 2. Trust in the state, rather than trust in financial institutions, plays a crucial role for people with low financial literacy, which is a critical factor in choosing the auto-enrolment option for pension savings. 3. Men had higher odds of auto-enrolment pension saving than women. 4. Employees of economic universities and academics had higher odds of participating in capital pension plans than those of general universities and non-academics. Our findings can signal to governments and policymakers about factors influencing the choice of auto-enrolment supplementary retirement savings. These findings strengthen the role of sustainable economic education.

Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of \"nudge\" interventions that governments are now adopting alter people's decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare favorably with traditional interventions. We conclude that nudging is a valuable approach that should be used more often in conjunction with traditional policies, but more calculations are needed to determine the relative effectiveness of nudging.

We study the impact of providing school report cards with test scores on subsequent test scores, prices, and enrollment in markets with multiple public and private providers. A randomly selected half of our sample villages (markets) received report cards. This increased test scores by 0.11 standard deviations, decreased private school fees by 17 percent, and increased primary enrollment by 4.5 percent. Heterogeneity in the treatment impact by initial school test scores is consistent with canonical models of asymmetric information. Information provision facilitates better comparisons across providers, and improves market efficiency and child welfare through higher test scores, higher enrollment, and lower fees.

Governments around the world are reforming their social security systems in light of the challenges posed by population aging. We study the 1993 Australian Age Pension reform, which progressively increased the eligibility age for women from 60 to 65 years. We find economically significant responses to the reform. An increase in the eligibility age of one year induced a decline in the probability of retirement by 12 to 19 percentage points. In addition, the reform induced significant program substitution, with increases in enrollment in other social insurance programs, particularly the disability support pension, which effectively functioned as an alternative source of retirement income.

This study investigates and compares the impacts of two important reforms in retirement savings—matching contribution and automatic enrollment—on participation in the individual pension system (IPS) in Turkey by using a dataset containing information about over 40 million pension contracts for the period of 2004–2021. Unlike the automatic enrollment system (AES), the state matching contribution policy imposes a burden on the state’s budget; understanding the relative effectiveness of the two policies can help protect the public budget from such burdens, especially by taking individual attitudes into account in future policy recommendations. Our estimations indicate that both reforms led to an overall increase in participation. However, the AES is not efficient at encouraging participants to make an active decision on plan characteristics, such as portfolio choices. We also evaluate the effects of the two reforms on IPS participation among different demographic groups. We find that males and married individuals are more responsive to matching contributions, and education levels seem to be closely related with IPS participation. Participants are also sensitive to both the returns of pension funds and alternative investment instruments. All the findings imply that individuals must be encouraged to recognize the need for effective financial preparation in their post-retirement lives. To accomplish this, policymakers could utilize a comprehensive informative campaign and workplace seminars about both the system as a whole and the returns, and they could improve the plan characteristics to be compatible with the needs of individuals before retirement as well as after.

We investigate the relationship between pension funds and financial stability in 25 European Union countries for the period from 2001–2017. We find that pension funds significantly reduce financial stress in crisis and non-crisis times but only in strong governance countries, and those governed by the prudent man rule provide additional stability to these countries. However, their effect is destabilizing in weak governance countries. These findings point to an important policy implication: automatic enrollment programs aimed at increasing participation in pension plans can support the stability of financial markets in strong governance countries of the European Union.

As police officers have become increasingly common in U.S. public schools, their role in school discipline has often expanded. While there is growing public debate about the consequences of police presence in schools, there is scant evidence of the impact of police on student discipline and academic outcomes. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimate of funding for school police on student outcomes, leveraging variation in federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants. Exploiting detailed data on over 2.5 million students in Texas, I find that federal grants for police in schools increase middle school discipline rates by 6 percent. The rise in discipline is driven by sanctions for low-level offenses or school code of conduct violations. Further, I find that Black students experience the largest increases in discipline. I also find that exposure to a three-year federal grant for school police is associated with a 2.5 percent decrease in high school graduation rates and a 4 percent decrease in college enrollment rates.

Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar schools not yet taken over. Grandfathering estimates from New Orleans show substantial gains from takeover enrollment In Boston, grandfathered students see achievement gains at least as large as the gains for students assigned charter seats in lotteries. A non-charter Boston turnaround intervention that had much in common with the takeover strategy generated gains as large as those seen for takeovers, while other more modest turnaround interventions yielded smaller effects.

This paper examines the Oregon Promise, a state-level program that exclusively subsidizes in-state community college attendance. I estimate impacts using a difference-in-difference design that links students in states with essentially universal 10th-grade PSAT coverage to national-level postsecondary enrollment data. I find that the implementation of the Oregon Promise increased enrollment at two-year colleges by roughly four to five percentage points for the first two eligible cohorts. In the first year of the program, the increase in community college enrollment comes primarily from students shifting out of four-year colleges, whereas in the second year the program predominately increases overall postsecondary enrollment.